Month: March 2012

A friend of mine is working on a device that requires multiple soft fabric pressure sensors over a volume approximately equivalent to a human arm. I have more Arduino experience than her, so I’m helping out with the electronic implementation details.

Our first attempt was to examine some commercial force-sensing resistors. These consist of a plastic layer with a pattern of interleaved contacts printed on it, and a layer of carbon-impregnated rubbery material over the contacts. The more pressure there is on the rubber, the more it touches the contacts and the lower its resistance becomes. These devices are very stable, yielding repeatable resistance measurements with repeated contacts. Unfortunately, they are of a fixed size, and cannot be cut or reshaped. They also are flexible, but not exactly soft.

After discarding that approach, we tried making our own force sensitive resistors out of the conductive foam from IC packaging. This works, but has a couple of problems. The first is that the resulting device doesn’t have a simple response to force. Its resistance goes down when pressed, and goes back up when released, but it doesn’t always return to the same values, and the resulting sensor data is noisy. We also don’t have a good source for a lot of IC packaging foam.

Most recently, we’ve tried making a pressure sensor based on a capacitor. The Arduino CapSense library provides a simple way to turn two pins of an Arduino into a capacitance sensor. One plate of the capacitor is a sheet of conductive material, the other plate is the user, and is effectively connected to ground (or at least “away” as charges can leave the circuit that way). The page notes that you can use the capacitive sensing pad, covered with an insulator, as a pressure sensor with an approximately logarithmic response.

However, it also notes that putting a ground plane under the touch sensor makes the results more stable. Instead of doing that, I put down the sensing plate, made of copper-coated nylon, two layers of soft interfacing (A sewing material kind of like a sheet of stuffed toy stuffing) and a ground plate made of silver-coated spandex over the interfacing. Pressing on the ground pad compresses the interfacing and brings the ground plate closer to the sensing plate, increasing the capacitance, and registering as pressure to the sensor. Because the upper/interactive surface is the ground plate, it shields the sensing plate, so the capacitive pressure sensor does not also act as a proximity sensor and trigger before it is touched.

I taped the bottom layer down to my desk, and hooked a clip lead to it. This lead goes to pin 2 of my Arduino.
Then I put two layers of interfacing on top.
Then I put the ground layer on top. This is connected to a clip lead that goes to a ground connection on the Arduino.

In the finished device, there will probably be a stuffed fabric tube with rings of conductive fabric around it as sensors, surrounded by a layer of interfacing, and then by a conductive grounded layer. There will also likely be an outer layer of fabric to protect and decorate the whole thing. In order to determine if this is a good way to build the thing, I intend to use the technique to make a stuffed toy that can detect squeezing.